True love - that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy - is a choice. It's a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances.
Mark Manson
Life is a never-ending stream of problems that must be confronted, surmounted, and/or solved.
Death is important for a couple reasons. The first is that death creates scarcity in our life, which therefore gives our decisions meaning and value. From a practical point of view, it therefore makes sense that we keep our own deaths in mind when deciding how to use our time.
When most people set out to change their lives, they often focus on all the external stuff, like a new job or a new location or new friends or a new romantic prospects and on and on. The reality is that changing your life starts with changing the way you see everything in your life.
Like anything worth doing in life, happiness takes time and patience and consistency.
If someone is better than you at something, then it's likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it's likely because he hasn't been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don't end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to love the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.
By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship.
Seeking approval and people pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think or feel.
That first morning that I woke up self-employed, terror quickly consumed me. I found myself sitting with my laptop and realized, for the first time, that I was entirely responsible for all of my own decisions, as well as the consequences of those decisions.
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you've failed at something.
I think humility - which I think is a very good value to adopt - is basically an extension of understanding your own ignorance.
The fear of failure never goes away. In many ways, you could argue that success multiplies the opportunities for failure. It's just more of an argument for becoming more comfortable with it.
The American Dream is simple: it's the unwavering belief that anybody - you, me, your friends, your neighbors, grandma Verna - can become exceedingly successful, and all it takes is the right amount of work, ingenuity, and determination.
Many people get into a relationship as a way to compensate for something they lack or hate within themselves. This is a one-way ticket to a toxic relationship because it makes your love conditional - you will love your partner as long as they help you feel better about yourself.
People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they're looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. Unfortunately, complaining is maybe the least useful way to connect with other human beings.
How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there's a really important distinction to understand is that you can't completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don't ever make that separation for what goes on with them.
Our moral philosophy determines our values - what we care about and what we don't care about - and our values determine our decisions, actions, and beliefs. Therefore, moral philosophy applies to everything in our lives.
You can't have a pain-free life. It can't all be roses and unicorns.
What's interesting about emotions is that the more you try to control them or to bottle them up, the stronger they get. So, the more I try to stop being sad, the sadder I'm going to get.
I think that, pretty much, any good thing taken to extremes can become a bad thing.
One of the beautiful things about Tyler Durden in 'Fight Club' is that he seems to understand the implicit vanity and self-absorption that comes with the desire to improve oneself.
For whatever reason, when it came out in 1995, 'Infinite Jest' became a cultural event. It was the massive book that was 'cool' for all the Gen Xers to read.
'War and Peace' may be the most epic thing ever created by a human being.
Whereas a lot of Buddhism concerns itself with stages of enlightenment, various precepts and moral codes, and even power structures and hierarchies, Zen is just like, 'Shut up, sit down, and observe your thoughts - oh, and by the way, what you perceive as you' doesn't actually exist.' I loved the minimalist approach of it.
At the core of all human behavior, the good feelings we all want are more or less the same. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we're willing to sustain.
I started my blog back in 2009 because every Internet business and marketing seminar I watched at the time told me I had to. I had been trying to get a business started selling dating and life advice and was struggling.
Just because you fall in love with someone doesn't necessarily mean they're a good partner for you to be with over the long term.
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
Little things, when we're caught up and fretting about them, often appear to be big and meaningful and world-changing in the moment they are happening.
When the standard of success becomes merely acting - when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite - we propel ourselves ahead.
At some point, most of us reach a place where we're afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we're already good at. This confines us and stifles us.
I had to decide that, you know what, I don't know who the hell I am or what I'm doing, but I do know that historically and scientifically and anecdotally, and anyone who is not an idiot knows, that waking up early and starting the day off with a nice, simple routine is a healthy and productive way to live one's life.
Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other's faults long enough to get some babymaking done. It generally only lasts for a few years at most.
I was a big party guy in my twenties, and kind of a playboy as well. I adopted a lot of values and goals that were fairly superficial and, in many cases, self-destructive. They looked cool and sounded sexy on the surface, but underneath, there was no real meaning going on, just a lot of escapism.
If everybody just stops caring about politics, we're going to lose the reins on our government.
One thing that I think most people don't notice is that if you're sitting around telling yourself, 'I want to be happier,' there's a kind of subconscious message that you're also telling yourself at the same time, which is, 'What I have is not enough.'
We all have great aspirations for ourselves, but if you expect yourself to change the world tomorrow, then you're going to just drown yourself in anxiety and constant feelings of inadequacy.
Approaching people looking for something in return isn't a relationship, it's a transaction.
I believe productivity is a deeply personal thing. We all have different brains and, therefore, different preferences, perspectives, and situations where we feel most effective.
We don't know what change is because we don't know what the hell we are. If I wake up tomorrow and do the exact opposite of everything I do today, am I a changed person? Or am I simply the same person who decided to try something different?
Life is a big and complex game. It's the largest open world game known to date. We all begin with different starting stats, and we're placed into a wide range of environments that can either give us advantages or disadvantages.
I love massive books: books so big, like bricks, you could drown yourself in a pool with them if you're not careful.
OK, I'm as lazy as the next guy. Full disclosure. And I often feel guilty about it.
In 2008, after holding down a day job for all of six weeks, I gave up on the whole job thing to pursue an online business. At the time, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I figured if I was going to be broke and miserable, I might as well be while working on my own terms.
If I ask you, 'What do you want out of life?' and you say something like, 'I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,' it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't even mean anything. Everyone wants that.
The first and perhaps most important thing to realize about being happier in life is to stop trying to be so happy in life.
The first step in making better choices is to simply be brutally honest about your own behavior to yourself. What are the choices you are making? How are you spending your time? What are you neglecting that you shouldn't?
Everything has an opportunity cost, and the big things we want in life - like happiness and healthy relationships and wealth - they all have big opportunity costs.
Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration.
